Grocery Store

From her vantage point inside the Forever Young Beauty Salon in Logan, Lisa Cleveland could only stand behind her locked door and shudder. She opened this salon three weeks ago under a banner of hope. Now the owner of the only other business at 11th and Rockland Streets has been killed - shot to death Tuesday night by a robber who crept into the C&P Grocery near closing time looking for cash. The details drifted slowly across the intersection to Cleveland. The grocer's name was Ralph Concepcion, and neighbors say he was a good man who loved his family and always went to church.

Drew Singer, a native of the Philadelphia area, is finishing an internship on The Inquirer's city desk. Headlines about flash-mob violence have made Center City sound like Gotham City. On Sunday, Mayor Nutter railed against the youths responsible. "They're lawless," he said. "They act with ignorance. They don't care about anybody else, and their behavior is outrageous. Well, we're not going to tolerate that. " The mayor then took defensive measures, extending rec-center hours and setting a new weekend curfew - 9 p.m. instead of midnight.

These are the products that prop up the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" (as the Coca-Cola Co. learned the hard way). They are the staples of the grocery store, recognizable at first glance, unchanged for decades. Some were introduced as far back as 140 years ago, others as recently as 1947. What accounts for the staying power of consumer classics like Arm & Hammer Baking Soda, Vaseline and Listerine? Their manufacturers' answer: These products work. It was a homemaker's problem - cuts and burns in the kitchen - that led to the development of Johnson & Johnson Band-Aids.

Cops looking for a link in grocery shootings * 65th Street near Lebanon Avenue, Overbrook Police were investigating whether there was a link between a shooting at a corner store in Overbrook yesterday and a triple homicide at a corner store in West Philadelphia earlier this month. Two men walked into the store on 65th Street near Lebanon and ordered a hoagie around 11:30 a.m. then announced a robbery, said Lt. John Walker, of Southwest Detectives. The 38-year-old clerk was shot in his head and was taken to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in critical condition.

Lucille "Mama Ceil" Frierson, a former businesswoman whose home was a focal point for its fine food and hospitality, died Tuesday. She was 76 and lived in North Philadelphia. In the early 1960s Frierson and her husband, Joseph, owned and operated Frierson's Grocery at 12th and Cambria streets. Her husband of 49 years is deceased. She also did factory work for a time. "She was a great cook and she was always inviting someone over to eat," said Lucille A. Stephens, a daughter. "On a Sunday afternoon people would drop by after church to enjoy a home-cooked meal.

Yeadon police are pressing a search for two men who pulled guns on a cashier and another employee at the Save-A-Lot grocery store, 617 Cedar Ave., and made off with $1,100. Yeadon Detective William Costello gave this account: Two men entered the store at 9:30 a.m. Friday with other customers and began shopping. They filled up a shopping cart and approached the checkout line. One man walked to the window ledge near the store safe and sat down. The other waited in line with the shopping cart, then pulled a handgun on the cashier and demanded money.

An armored car robbery at a Whole Foods Market yesterday led to a three-hour search in this Main Line community and an emergency lockdown at Lower Merion High School. Officers with rifles and police dogs searched an adjacent neighborhood for one gunman, who had run across the SEPTA railroad tracks behind the grocery. A second gunman escaped in a dark green Lexus sedan with Pennsylvania registration ELP5386. Neither man was in custody last night. "It looks like they eluded our net," Lower Merion Police Superintendent Joseph J. Daly said.

The Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to rezone a four-acre tract near Bell Run Boulevard and clear the way for the 10th grocery store within a two-mile radius Tuesday night, leaving residents steamed, stupefied and crying foul. "It's not fair, it's not equitable, and it's not right," said Cherner Rachmel, who had to be restrained during an argument with Marc Kaplin, the attorney for the developers. "There is a lot going on here that is not above board. " Among their complaints, residents said that they had reached an agreement with developers at a public meeting last month, but that the supervisors allowed the developers to privately and unilaterally reverse several concessions.

Cops last night collared four men suspected of being the gunmen who stuck up a West Philadelphia grocery, blasted out the rear window of an unmarked police car and sought refuge in an abandoned house. Nobody was hurt. Two robbers fleeing the 9:45 p.m. stickup fell to the sidewalk on Baltimore Avenue near 42nd Street and surrendered when swarms of officers surrounded them, police said. Two others scaled a six-foot fence topped with barbed wire and slipped inside a boarded-up, three-story twin house, police said.

Joyce Steele dreams of financial success and independence for her son Torre, which she hopes he'll find among carefully arranged displays of canned goods, breakfast cereals, baked beans, toilet paper, ketchup and other grocery items for sale at Lenape High School. Until this year Room D107 at the high school in Medford was a classroom that looked like dozens of others at the school. The chalkboard is still there, but now D107 has a new name and a new look that includes a cash register, aisle shelves, a conveyor belt and a refrigerator.